A 24-year-old woman approached Cuffe Parade police last year with a complaint alleging that she was duped of Rs 1.21 lakh by unknown callers. (Representational image)
With the arrest of three persons, the Mumbai Police has claimed to have busted a fake call centre racket operating from Noida. The Cuffe Parade police, which made the arrests, said the group would call people in Mumbai posing as customer care executives from monster.com and lure them with job offers at banks.
The accused have been identified as Devrushi Kumar Sharma, Vikrant Giri and Jaideep Shastri. While Sharma was arrested in July, Giri was held last week and Shastri, the mastermind, on Thursday.
Police said a 24-year-old woman approached Cuffe Parade police last year with a complaint alleging that she was duped of Rs 1.21 lakh by unknown callers. Jyoti Singh Chaudhary, in her statement to the police, alleged that she had uploaded her resume on several job portals in June last year, following which, she started getting calls from the fraudsters. The caller posed as an executive from monster.com and claimed that she has got a job in a private bank.
“The caller started demanding money, terming it as processing fees. The victim ended up paying Rs 1.21 lakh to them. Later, as they stopped responding to her calls, she approached the police,” said an officer.
During the course of investigation, the police learnt that the money was being deposited in the bank account of one Devrushi Kumar Sharma, a resident of Uttar Pradesh. A team was sent and Sharma was brought in for questioning in July. “He confessed to his involvement… and said he only gave his account number to the masterminds… He was arrested,” said an officer.
Sharma revealed the name of another accused Vikrant Giri, who had approached him asking for his bank account details. Following this, Giri was arrested from Noida last week. He revealed that he had provided the bank account number to Shastri.
On Thursday, Shastri was arrested from Noida. He said they had rented an office in Noida from where they would make several calls in a day. “Shastri said that around 15 people were working for him,” said an officer.
Investigators suspect that more than 100 people across India have been duped by the accused, who have been operating the fake call centre since 2015.
The police said the three have been booked for cheating under the IPC. They were produced before a local court, which has remanded Shastri in police custody and the others to judicial custody.